The Blue House
La maison bleue
Hamedine Kane | 2020 | Belgium, Senegal, Cameroon | 55’ | digital

Senegalese-Mauritian filmmaker Hamedine Kane’s The Blue House is an intimately observed portrait of Alpha, a charismatic artist living and working in exile in the Calais Jungle. Alpha transformed his self-built cabin into a living artwork: an evolving sculpture made from water bottles, plastic chairs and cassette tapes discarded around the camp. “The Blue House on The Hill” soon attracts the attention of the international art world as dealers and gallerists travel to the Jungle in increasing numbers, in the hope of acquiring it for exhibition. Amidst the rising clamour, Alpha and Kane share stories of their homeland and continue to make their art – the sculpture and film together constituting a shared space for poetic expression and resistance.

The House is Yet to Be Built
A casa, a verdadeira e a seguinte, ainda está por fazer
Sílvia das Fadas | 2018 | Portugal, Austria, USA | 35’ | 16mm

Sílvia das Fadas traces a journey between five sites of revolutionary outsider architecture: an ideal palace built by a postman after each of his daily rounds; a red house designed by a socialist agitator; a pacifist tower erected against the movements of History; an exuberant garden engendered in the feminine; and a merry cemetery, which conjures a community of equals in the outskirts of Europe. A travelogue to places which defy the surface of the world.

In partnership with Wallonia-Brussels International

Followed by a conversation with Hamedine Kane

Hamedine Kane, Senegalese and Mauritanian artist and film director, lives and works between Brussels and Dakar. Through his practice, Hamedine Kane frequents borders, not as signs and factors of impossibility, but as places of passage and transformation, as a central element in the conception of itinerant identity. He uses words and images to highlight the notions of exile, wandering, and movement but also to replace political time with living time. He developed a strong interest in memory and heritage which reflected in “The School of Mutants” with Stéphane Verlet-Bottero, a research project that intermingles with the past and the future, transgressing and irrigating the limits of space and time. His film The Blue House received a special mention from the jury at IDFA in Amsterdam in 2020.

“Hamedine Kane's portrait of an artist living in the Calais Jungle is followed by Sílvia das Fadas' travelogue across sites of revolutionary outsider architecture.”